If you’re interested in home automation, I think that there’s a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don’t want to take it down, especially if it’s doing things like lighting control.

Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.

Other than that, though, I’d probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.

EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don’t have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

Neat!

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_record_messaging

Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.

The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]

I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

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https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord

It looks like there’s software to bridge it to Matrix. I have no idea whether that violates ToS. It does look like it’s getting development, though, so I can’t imagine that Discord has been cutting people off en masse for using it.

I get that.

Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.

I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.

Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.

There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.

But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.

I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/t417q1/can_someone_please_explain_discord_to_me_like_im/

It’s just modern day IRC with video.

Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.

Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).

Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.

Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.

But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.

If I need to do an emergency boot from a USB stick to repair something that can’t boot, which it sounds like is what you’re after, pretty much any Linux distro will do. I’d probably rather have a single, mainstream bootable OS than a handful.

I’d use Debian, just because that’s what I use normally, so I’m most familiar with it. But it really doesn’t matter all that much.

And honestly, while having an emergency bootable medium with a functioning system can simplify things, if you’re familiar with the boot process, you very rarely actually need emergency boot media on a Linux system. You have a pretty flexible bootloader in grub, and the Linux kernel can run and be usable enough to fix things on a pretty broken system, if you pass something like init=/bin/sh to the kernel, maybe busybox instead for a really broken system, and can remount root read-write (mount -o rw,remount /) and know how to force syncs (echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger) and reboots (echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger).

I’ve killed ld.so and libc before and broght back systems without alternate boot media. The only time I think you’d likely really get into trouble truly requiring alternate boot media is (a) installing a new kernel that doesn’t work for some reason and removing all the old, working kernels before checking to see that your new one works, or (b) killing grub. Maybe if you hork up your partition table or root filesystem enough that grub can’t bring the kernel up, but in most of those cases, I’m not sure that you’re likely gonna be bringing things back up with rescue tools – you’re probably gonna need to reinstall your OS anyway.

EDIT: Well, okay, if you wipe the partition table, I guess that you might be able to find the beginning of a filesystem partition based on magic strings or something and either manually reconstruct the partition table or at least extract a copy of the filesystem to somewhere else.

CIFS supports leases. That is, hosts will try to ask for exclusive access to a file, so that they can assume that it hasn’t changed.

IIRC sshfs just doesn’t care much about cache coherency across hosts and just kind of assumes that things haven’t changed underfoot, uses a timer to expire the cache.

considers

Honestly, with inotify, it’d probably be possible to make a newer sshfs that does support leases.

I suspect that the Unixy thing to do is to use NFSv4 which also does cache coherency correctly.

It is easy to deploy sshfs, though, so I do appreciate why people use it; I do so myself.

kagis to see if anyone has benchmarks

https://blog.ja-ke.tech/2019/08/27/nas-performance-sshfs-nfs-smb.html

Here are some 2019 benchmarks that show NFSv4 to generally be the most-performant.

The really obnoxious thing about NFSv4, IMHO, is that ssh is pretty trivial to set up, and sshfs just requires a working ssh connection and sshfs software installed, whereas if you want secure NFSv4, you need to set up Kerberos. Setting up Kerberos is a pain. It’s great for large organizations, but for “I have three computers that I want to make talk together”, it’s just overkill.

I don’t know how hd-idle stores its data, but sysstat and some other utilities will log I/O on a per-device data and there are utilities that can graph it.

I once worked on a product that you really did not want to have not coming back up. I was on it several years after the original engineers had designed an early model. Said engineers had not tested what happened when the CMOS battery died and triggered a reset of BIOS settings, brought it back to the hardware platform’s default state. When it did, the thing entered a non-bootable state. You could, with a serial port, access the BIOS and fiddle the settings back for one good boot…but the CMOS battery was non-removable, soldered to the motherboard. Our manufacturing process had not involved changing the default BIOS settings, just what was stored in CMOS. Oops.

IIRC our customer care guys just sent out new models for free to affected customers – the original hardware model wasn’t sold in large volume, and the cost of the actual hardware components wasn’t especially large relative to the cost of the product.

I had one sitting around on my desk, as it was sometimes handy to have a physically-accessible device to do work on. I rolled down to Radio Shack – yes, this was a few years back – got a removable CMOS battery case, stripped the non-removable battery out, soldered the battery case to the motherboard, and had the only instance of the device out there that could take a fresh CMOS battery.

I haven’t used Piper, but I do want to let you know that it may be a lot easier than you think. I have used TortoiseTTS, and there, you can just fed in a handful (like, four or so) short clips (maybe six seconds, arbitrary speech), and that’s adequate to let it do a reasonable facimile of the voice in the recordings. Like, it doesn’t involve long recording sessions speaking back pre-recorded speech, and you can even combine samples from different people to “mix” their voices. I grabbed a few clean short recordings from video of someone speaking, and that was sufficient. TortoiseTTS doesn’t even retain the model, rebuilds it from scratch from the samples you provided every time it renders voice (which is a testament to how little data it pulls in). It’s not on par with, say, the tremendous amount of work involved in creating a voice for Festival or similar. The “Option B” for Piper on the page I linked to has:

I have built usable voice models with as few as 50 samples of the target voice.

…which is more than the tiny handful that I was using on TortoiseTTS, but might open up a lot of options and provide control over what you’re hearing, especially if you have a voice that you really like.

But, okay. Say you decide that you want to go the post-text-to-speech transform route. Do you have any idea how you want to process them? The most-obvious things I can think of are:

• Pitch-shifting, like if you want the voice to sound more feminine or masculine.

• Tempo-shifting, like if you want the voice to speak more-quickly or more-slowly, but without altering the pitch.

Those are straightforward transforms that people do do on voice recordings; if you want a command-line tool that can do this in a pipeline, sox is a good choice that I’ve used in the past.

I can imagine that maybe you just want to apply some kind of effect to it (sounding like a robot in an echoy cave? Someone talking over an old radio? Shifting perceptual 3d position in space of the audio source?). There’s a Linux – I’m assuming, given your preference for a CLI, and the community, that this is a Linux environment – audio plugin system called LADSPA and a successor system called LV2. Most Linux audio software, including sox, can run these on audio streams.

You can maybe do automated removal of silent bits, if there are excessive pauses…sox has silence-removal functionality.

But most other things that I can think of that one might want to do to a voice, more-sophisticated stuff, like making it sound happy, say, or giving it a different accent or something…I think that it’s going to be a lot harder to do that after the text-to-speech phase rather than before.

Do you guys have any recommendation for a voice changer to process these audio files?

I’m not totally sure what you’re going for.

If you want to transform spoken audio to a different sort of voice, then that’s one problem.

But this Piper thing appears to be a text-to-speech software package, and I’d think that it’d be easier and provide a more-capable system to just obtain a different voice and re-generate the audio from the text, rather than generating the audio and then transforming it, unless I’m not getting what you’re going for.

Like, here’s a project – which I have not used – to generate Piper voices from audio samples of speech.

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Is max tokens different from context size?

No. Same thing. If you hover over the question mark by “Max Tokens” in the Kobold AI Web UI:

“Max number of tokens of context to submit to the AI for sampling. Make sure this is higher than Amount to Generate. Higher values increase VRAM/RAM usage.”

https://old.reddit.com/r/KoboldAI/comments/163jfmo/more_than_512_tokens_possible/

nevermind, just realised you can type in the token amount

tries it

Yeah. There’s a slider, and if you enter a number outside its acceptable range, it’ll be red, but it’ll still permit using the number. Worked with Amount to Generate = 1024 and Max Tokens (which also needs to be increased) set to 2048 in a quick test.

For any computer today, server or no, I’d probably default to SSD today unless I expected to be making use of a large store of files that I expected to access in serial, like a large movie collection or maybe a backup server that can play well with rotational drives.

The only thing there that looks like it could be doing that is the Samba server, depending upon what the remote clients are doing with it (could be a movie server).

In general, if you can fit your stuff on an SSD today, I’d get an SSD.

You also can also add a rotational drive down the line if you run low on space and need inexpensive space for something that you’re going to access in serial, and use both; just move the bulk stuff to the rotational drive then.

I did some time back. I don’t recall it being incredibly difficult to get running. What hardware are you trying to run it on?

APC Back-UPS 850.

I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.